The Notebook That Ate the Dashboard
Hex is doing something that Mode Analytics spent years building toward but never quite landed: making collaborative data notebooks feel like a natural workspace for business teams, not just engineers. The result is a quiet but steady erosion of Mode’s core user base – the data analysts who sit between raw SQL and executive dashboards.
How Hex Built a Stickier Workflow
Hex launched with a simple premise: data notebooks should work the way Google Docs does. Multiple people in the same file, changes visible in real time, no emailing static exports or fighting over dashboard edit permissions. That sounds obvious in retrospect, but the analytics tool market was dominated for years by products that treated collaboration as a feature rather than a foundation. Mode built its reputation on SQL-first reporting with clean visualizations, and for a long time that was enough.
The gap Hex exploited is what happens after the analysis is done. In a typical Mode workflow, an analyst writes a query, builds a chart, and then publishes a report that stakeholders read passively. The conversation about what the data means happens somewhere else – in Slack, in a meeting, in a follow-up email. Hex collapses that loop. Comments, narrative text, Python cells, and interactive charts all live in the same document, so the interpretation of data and the data itself stay together.
Hex also made a deliberate bet on Python as a first-class citizen alongside SQL. Mode has Python notebook functionality, but it feels grafted on compared to the SQL-reporting core. Hex treats both as equal inputs into the same workflow, which matters enormously to the growing cohort of analysts who move fluidly between languages depending on the task. That flexibility lowers friction in a way that compounds over time – once a team’s muscle memory is built around Hex’s interface, switching back feels like a downgrade.
The product has also added AI-assisted code generation at a pace that outstrips what Mode has shipped. For analysts who are not deep engineers, having an AI layer that can draft a SQL query or explain a Python function without leaving the notebook is not a novelty – it is a workflow unlock. Mode has incorporated AI features, but Hex has moved faster and integrated those features more tightly into the actual editing experience rather than treating them as an add-on panel.
Mode’s Structural Problem
Mode’s challenge is not that it built a bad product. Its SQL editor is genuinely strong, its charting is polished, and its report-sharing features are well-understood by the teams that use them. The problem is that the product was designed for a specific era of analytics work – one where the analyst was a service provider producing outputs for non-technical stakeholders. That model is under pressure from every direction.
Data teams have grown more technical on average, and the line between “analyst” and “data scientist” has blurred significantly. Teams that once needed a clean dashboard tool now want something that can also handle exploratory analysis, statistical modeling, and ad hoc Python work without switching contexts. Mode’s architecture makes that harder than it should be, and competitors like Hex have built products that assume technical fluency from the start rather than designing around the lowest common denominator.
There is also a go-to-market dimension worth examining. Mode has traditionally sold into mid-sized companies through a combination of self-serve and sales-assisted motions. Hex has pursued a similar path but with a product-led growth strategy that generates strong word-of-mouth among individual analysts. When one person at a company starts using Hex for personal or freelance work and then advocates for it internally, that bottom-up motion is genuinely hard to counter with a top-down sales pitch about Mode’s enterprise features.
Mode was acquired by ThoughtSpot in 2023, and while that deal gave Mode access to resources and an enterprise distribution channel, it also introduced strategic complexity. ThoughtSpot’s core product is built around natural language querying and AI-driven analytics – a somewhat different vision from Mode’s SQL-first roots. Integrating two distinct product philosophies while a nimble competitor is actively recruiting your users is not a position any company wants to be in.
Hex, by contrast, has stayed focused. The company has raised significant venture funding and has used it to build out the core product rather than acquiring adjacent companies or pivoting toward a broader platform story. That focus is visible in the product – there is a coherence to Hex’s feature set that Mode has struggled to maintain since the ThoughtSpot acquisition introduced competing priorities. The analytics tool space has a history of focus beating breadth when the core workflow is the battleground, and that is exactly where Hex has chosen to fight. This dynamic is playing out across the enterprise software world – Dust’s focused enterprise AI approach peeling clients away from Microsoft Copilot is another version of the same story.
What Comes Next for Both Companies
The near-term question for Mode is whether ThoughtSpot’s enterprise reach can open doors that Hex cannot yet access – large procurement deals, deep IT integrations, compliance requirements that favor established vendors. Those advantages are real, particularly in heavily regulated industries where a newer vendor’s security posture gets scrutinized more aggressively. Mode still has a substantial installed base, and switching costs in analytics tooling are not trivial once a company has built dozens of reports and trained a team on a specific interface.
Hex’s risk is the opposite: staying independent long enough to reach the scale where its collaborative notebook approach becomes the obvious default rather than a compelling alternative. The analytics infrastructure market rewards incumbents heavily once workflows are embedded, and Hex is still early enough that a single large competitor – Databricks, Snowflake, or even a resurgent Mode – could ship a product that closes the gap faster than Hex can widen it. For now, Hex’s advantage lives in daily user habits, and Mode’s best counter is to make changing those habits feel expensive.
